


Phantasmagoria

by ncfan



Series: Fictober 2018 [3]
Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Fictober 2018, Fluff, M/M, Probably too fluffy for this fandom but whatever it's a prompt fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 19:10:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16225484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: It was quieter at night in Bolton than it had been in Arkham, though that was fast turning out to be entirely relative. [Written for Fictober 2018]





	Phantasmagoria

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Fictober 2018 prompt, “I know you do.”

Bolton was not Arkham. It was somewhat smaller (though possibly not for much longer, if the growth of the mill was any indication), the population much more concentrated around the town center, and the scattered collection of houses outside of it much smaller. Which was very convenient for their work, though Stephen would admit that before he’d moved to a house so far from any town center that he might as well have been living in the middle of nowhere sometimes, he had never thought he would miss looking out from his window and seeing the roofs of Arkham’s buildings. After a lifetime of living in cities, looking out of his window at night and seeing grass and trees and nothing else was a discordant image.

It was quieter at night, though that was a more complicated statement than you might think. Arkham had been quiet at night, too, but it was a silence so charged with a nameless unease that it had a voice all its own, and might as well not have been silence at all. He occasionally caught the strains of that in Bolton, but it was much weaker, and out here, it was practically non-existent. At night you heard the wind blowing against the roof and the exterior walls. You heard the rain, you heard the screeching cries of owls, and you did not register an oppressive silence that counseled you not to speak, not to look out your windows, not to look too long at the shadows that passed by.

He could hear Herbert moving around in the house too, sometimes, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

The first time it happened, he thought someone had decided to break into the house, that someone had decided that their new home was a prime target for robbery and decided to follow that desire through. Certainly, the house was still a bit ramshackle-looking from the outside; it wasn’t too far-fetched that someone might also have thought the locks were unequal to the task of keeping unwanted visitors out. But when he opened his door, all he saw was Herbert coming back up the stairs, quiet, a little twitchy, and a muttered apology escaping his mouth as he disappeared back inside of his own room.

After that, the sounds didn’t alarm him anymore, though it was getting to be a bit concerning. It wasn’t every night. If they were stuck working late into the evening, upstairs or in the cellar, or if they were otherwise engaged, it didn’t happen then. And Stephen thought there might be nights when Herbert roamed the house restlessly and he just didn’t wake up; there had certainly been mornings when Herbert didn’t look as rested as he ought to have.

Tonight, Stephen woke to a pale strip of moonlight from the gap in the curtains bisecting his bed, and the sound of floorboards creaking in the hallway outside his door.

The house was not in the mood to settle tonight, and when Stephen opened the door to the hallway, it opened on a silence that was altogether normal, the silence of a still night in a quiet place. The curtains over the window at the end of the hallway (old, yellowed lace that didn’t match with the curtains over any of the other windows in the house) had been thrown back, and the pale wash of light glimmering on the floor threw the darkness into stark relief.

Herbert leaned against the far left side of the sill, hand braced against the edge of the sill. It was too dark to see his face; the light was behind him, not before. The lines of his body were harsh and jagged, like something filled with too many bones. He stood still as stone, and if Stephen hadn’t known better, he would have thought he wasn’t even breathing.

As it was, he said softly, by way of announcement, “It’s half-past one.”

Slowly, Herbert dragged his gaze away from the window, though even like this, Stephen could scarcely see his face. There was a flash of light on the frames of his spectacles, but the skin was not lit up. “I woke you.” His voice was quiet, barely carried down the hall. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing?” he asked, concern bleeding out into curiosity, too weak to sustain itself at half-past one in the morning.

A small shrug and a short, soft huff. “Chasing sleep, I suppose. I can’t seem to quiet my mind.” Suddenly, he asked him “What do you think about when you can’t sleep?”

Perhaps the fact that Stephen was, at best, half-awake kept this from seeming absurd. It was close enough to dreaming for his mind to accept the non-existent logic of a dream. “The weather. Schoolwork and exams, when we were still at the university. The last letter I got from my parents. The bills, and whether or not we’ll have the money to pay them when they come. I worry about that, you know.”

Softly, “I know you do.”

“And what about you? What is it that has you wandering the house at all hours of the night?”

“Chemical formulas. Decomposition rates.” With a toss of his head and a wry tone to his voice, “The mill. Many other things, besides. I won’t say what; I don’t think you’d like to hear. My mind just likes to race when I can’t find sleep.”

So Stephen had gathered. He’d stopped counting the nights he heard movement outside his door around a month ago, and they hadn’t even been here all that long.

Every moment outside of his bed was a moment the night’s chill seeped deeper and deeper into his bones. He struggled to get a better look at Herbert in the shadows, tried to pick out any hint of shivering, if it existed. But the darkness behind the light was too dense, and Herbert was rendered all but a silhouette, thin and jagged and bony-looking. Something he wanted to hold fast and coax back into a human shape, though those edges might look sharp enough to cut.

“We have work in the morning.” Stephen held out a hand to him. “Come to bed.”

There came a moment of stretched silence that made Stephen wish more than anything that he could see Herbert’s face properly. “I don’t think you want my company tonight,” he said at last, in a somewhat stilted voice.

“I do, actually.” Stephen tilted his head, peering into the dark. “Do you want mine?”

A moment’s hesitation, and then Herbert slid away from the windowsill. His gait signified nothing of hesitance; his gait signified nothing at all. It was too dark, still, to make anything out.

Stephen winced reflexively when Herbert put his hand in his. “Your hands are like ice,” he scolded, grabbing the other before Herbert could try to pull away—not that he did.

“The season’s turning,” was Herbert’s only reply.

“How long have you been wandering the house?”

“…I couldn’t say.”

In the room, the only light was that narrow strip of moonlight from the gap in the curtains, and it didn’t reach any further than the bed. Stephen didn’t bother turning on the lamp. He knew his room well enough to keep from walking into any furniture, and turning on the lamp would have simply blinded them both. The darkness felt… right, somehow. Felt like a shelter, though there was no one here to see them, no one to hear them.

He met no resistance in slipping Herbert’s spectacles down off of his face; it would be light out by the time he needed them again, and no desire to read into the small hours of the morning seemed to exist within him tonight. A soft sigh when Stephen reached out to cradle his face in his hands; the faint, but still immediately noticeable, twitch of muscles forming a smile when Stephen tilted his head gently up.

Herbert’s eyelids and his lips were cold under Stephen’s mouth. The puff of breath that escaped his mouth was hot; the hand that crept up to stroke Stephen’s knuckles clammy and barely retaining the tattered edges of borrowed warmth. The body that curled up in his arms in bed looked just as harsh and jagged as it had by the windowsill in the hall, but it felt just as it ever had—soft in places and hard in others, and the hard edges just where there wasn’t enough spare flesh to hide the shapes of bones that had always been there, and nothing that shouldn’t have been. Soft and hard and uneven and perfect. Close your eyes, and the discordant image vanishes from memory in a flash.

Sleep found him again quickly; it was the rare night it did not, when he was sharing his bed. Stephen went to sleep with a hand slowly stroking his hair, and a humming voice vibrating against his collarbone, a tune he struggled to place and couldn’t, and remembered none of come the morning.


End file.
